Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader

Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader PDF Author: Sarah Barbour
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838752357
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Situated at an intersection of feminist critical practice in the United States and feminist cultural theory in France, Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader is an investigation of the way in which this French New Novelist's first eight works, in their increasing dramatization of the issue of reading, problematize certain feminist literary analyses, especially in relation to "l'ecriture feminine." After an exploration of the difficulty Sarraute's writing poses for the critical enterprise through a lengthy reading of Sarrautien criticism in the U.S. and France, Sarah Barbour shows how Sarraute's works eventually prohibit any fixed reading and open up instead a space in which we as readers are moved toward a more personal understanding of our use of narrative and of socio-sexual constructs in the continual, day-to-day constitution and reconstitution of subjectivity. Nathalie Sarraute conceives of the evolution of the novel as a movement through history and thus situates her work within a tradition of psychological realism at the same time that she proposes radical innovations of the tradition. Her novels do not discard or revise past works but rather internalize them in an effort to expand the notion of what is possible for psychological realism. This study takes as its model Sarraute's example of simultaneity, which invites an understanding of time both as a diachronic movement through "phases, ": from the psychological realism of Dostoyevski to that of Kafka to her own, and as a synchronic encounter that elicits simultaneous relationships to different "phases." Within the movement of feminist literary criticism scholars have often discerned what are also referred to as "phases;" that is, criticism in the United States has moved from its initial concern with images of women in fiction by male writers to a desire to establish a feminine tradition of women's writing. Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader is not an attempt to claim that Sarraute's work represents "ecriture feminine." Reading Sarraute's novels in their "evolution," Sarah Barbour has found that they forced her own reading and understanding of this term to "evolve." She therefore proposes that the novels open up a space that is beyond the frozen shells of gender, which continue to bind women and men personally and critically. The power of Sarraute's work lies in the solitary experience of our encounter with her presentation and perception of reality. In this encounter we are forced to experience the fluid nature of subjectivity; that is, to internalize and explore differences within personal and sexual identity that, by extension, affect the identity of larger political movements.

Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader

Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader PDF Author: Sarah Barbour
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838752357
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
Situated at an intersection of feminist critical practice in the United States and feminist cultural theory in France, Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader is an investigation of the way in which this French New Novelist's first eight works, in their increasing dramatization of the issue of reading, problematize certain feminist literary analyses, especially in relation to "l'ecriture feminine." After an exploration of the difficulty Sarraute's writing poses for the critical enterprise through a lengthy reading of Sarrautien criticism in the U.S. and France, Sarah Barbour shows how Sarraute's works eventually prohibit any fixed reading and open up instead a space in which we as readers are moved toward a more personal understanding of our use of narrative and of socio-sexual constructs in the continual, day-to-day constitution and reconstitution of subjectivity. Nathalie Sarraute conceives of the evolution of the novel as a movement through history and thus situates her work within a tradition of psychological realism at the same time that she proposes radical innovations of the tradition. Her novels do not discard or revise past works but rather internalize them in an effort to expand the notion of what is possible for psychological realism. This study takes as its model Sarraute's example of simultaneity, which invites an understanding of time both as a diachronic movement through "phases, ": from the psychological realism of Dostoyevski to that of Kafka to her own, and as a synchronic encounter that elicits simultaneous relationships to different "phases." Within the movement of feminist literary criticism scholars have often discerned what are also referred to as "phases;" that is, criticism in the United States has moved from its initial concern with images of women in fiction by male writers to a desire to establish a feminine tradition of women's writing. Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader is not an attempt to claim that Sarraute's work represents "ecriture feminine." Reading Sarraute's novels in their "evolution," Sarah Barbour has found that they forced her own reading and understanding of this term to "evolve." She therefore proposes that the novels open up a space that is beyond the frozen shells of gender, which continue to bind women and men personally and critically. The power of Sarraute's work lies in the solitary experience of our encounter with her presentation and perception of reality. In this encounter we are forced to experience the fluid nature of subjectivity; that is, to internalize and explore differences within personal and sexual identity that, by extension, affect the identity of larger political movements.

Nathalie Sarraute

Nathalie Sarraute PDF Author: Ann Jefferson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210241
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The definitive biography of a leading twentieth-century French writer A leading exponent of the nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute (1900–1999) was also one of France's most cosmopolitan literary figures, and her life was bound up with the intellectual and political ferment of twentieth-century Europe. Ann Jefferson's Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between is the authoritative biography of this major writer. Sarraute's life spanned a century and a continent. Born in tsarist Russia to Jewish parents, she was soon uprooted and brought to the city that became her lifelong home, Paris. This dislocation presaged a life marked by ambiguity and ambivalence. A stepchild in two families, a Russian émigré in Paris, a Jew in bourgeois French society, and a woman in a man’s literary world, Sarraute was educated at Oxford, Berlin, and the Sorbonne. She embarked on a career in law that was ended by the Nazi occupation of France, and she spent much of the war in hiding, under constant threat of exposure. Rising to literary eminence after the Liberation, she was initially associated with the existentialist circle of Beauvoir and Sartre, before becoming the principal theorist and practitioner of the avant-garde French novel of the 1950s and 1960s. Her tireless exploration of the deepest parts of our inner psychological life produced an oeuvre that remains daringly modern and resolutely unclassifiable. Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between explores Sarraute's work and the intellectual, social, and political context from which it emerged. Drawing on newly available archival material and Sarraute's letters, this deeply researched biography is the definitive account of a life lived between countries, families, languages, literary movements, and more.

Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory

Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory PDF Author: Ann Jefferson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139426796
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Nathalie Sarraute (1900–99) is regarded as one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century. Initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, she has come to be regarded as an important author in her own right with her own distinctive concerns. In this major 2000 study of Sarraute, the first in English since her death, Ann Jefferson offers a fresh perspective on Sarraute's entire oeuvre - her novels, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings - by focusing on the crucial issue of difference which emerges as one of her central preoccupations. Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, Jefferson explores Sarraute's fundamental ambivalence to differences of various kinds including questions of gender and genre. She argues that difference is simultaneously asserted and denied in Sarraute's work, and that the notion of difference, so often celebrated by other writers and thinkers, is shown in Sarraute's work to the inseparable from ambiguity and anxiety.

Unbecoming Language

Unbecoming Language PDF Author: Annabel L. Kim
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814213841
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
An examination of a corpus of modern and contemporary French literature which argues for feminist theory reclaiming anti-difference and literature's revolutionary possibilities.

The Planetarium

The Planetarium PDF Author: Nathalie Sarraute
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN: 1628974176
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
A young writer has his heart set on his aunt's large apartment. With this seemingly simple conceit, the characters of The Planetarium are set in orbit and a galaxy of argument, resentment, and bitterness erupts. Telling the story from various points of view, Sarraute focuses below the surface, on the emotional lives of the characters in a way that surpasses even Virginia Woolf. Always deeply engaging, The Planetarium reveals the deep disparity between the way we see ourselves and the way others see us.

Basic Black With Pearls

Basic Black With Pearls PDF Author: Helen Weinzweig
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681372169
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
A brilliant, lost feminist classic that is equal parts domestic drama and international intrigue. Shirley and Coenraad’s affair has been going on for decades, but her longing for him is as desperate as ever. She is a Toronto housewife; he works for an international organization known only as the Agency. Their rendezvous take place in Tangier, in Hong Kong, in Rome and are arranged by an intricate code based on notes slipped into issues of National Geographic. He recognizes her by her costume: a respectable black dress and string of pearls; his appearance, however, is changeable. But something has happened, the code has been discovered, and Coenraad sends Shirley (who prefers to be known as “Lola Montez”) to Toronto, the last place she wants to go. There the trail leads her through the sites of her impoverished immigrant childhood and sends her, finally, to her own house, where she discards her pearls and trades in her basic black for a dress of vibrant multicolored silk. Helen Weinzweig published her first novel when she was fifty-eight. Basic Black with Pearls, her second, won the Toronto Book Award and has since come to be recognized as a feminist landmark. Here Weinzweig imbues the formal inventiveness of the nouveau roman with psychological poignancy and surprising humor to tell a story of simultaneous dissolution and discovery.

A History of Women's Writing in France

A History of Women's Writing in France PDF Author: Sonya Stephens
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521581677
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This volume was the first historical introduction to women's writing in France from the sixth century to the present day. Specially-commissioned essays by leading scholars provide an introduction in English to the wealth and diversity of French women writers, offering fascinating readings and perspectives. The volume as a whole offers a cohesive history of women's writing which has sometimes been obscured by the canonisation of a small feminine elite. Each chapter focuses on a given period and a range of writers, taking account of prevailing sexual ideologies and women's activities in, or their relation to, the social, political, economic and cultural surroundings. Complemented by an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary works and a biographical guide to more than one hundred and fifty women writers, it represents an invaluable resource for those wishing to discover or extend their knowledge of French literature written by women.

Feminism

Feminism PDF Author: A. Maynor Hardee
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789051834840
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description


The Facts on File Companion to the French Novel

The Facts on File Companion to the French Novel PDF Author: Karen L. Taylor
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0816074992
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
French novels such as "Madame Bovary" and "The Stranger" are staples of high school and college literature courses. This work provides coverage of the French novel since its origins in the 16th century, with an emphasis on novels most commonly studied in high school and college courses in world literature and in French culture and civilization.

Tropisms

Tropisms PDF Author: Nathalie Sarraute
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811222772
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40

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Book Description
Nathalie Sarraute's stunning debut—vignettes of "inner movements"—foreshadowed the rise of the nouveau roman. Hailed as a masterpiece by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Tropisms is considered one of the defining texts of the nouveau roman movement. Nathalie Sarraute has defined her work as the “movements that are hidden under the commonplace, harmless instances of our everyday lives.” Like figures in a grainy photograph, Sarraute’s characters are blurred and shadowy, while her narrative never develops beyond a stressed moment. Instead, Sarraute brilliantly finds and elaborates subtle details—when a relationship changes, when we fall slightly deeper into love, or when something innocent tilts to the smallest degree toward suspicion.